Count the words of the first verse in Hebrew. There are seven. Bereshit, bara, Elohim, et, hashamayim, ve’et, ha’arets — seven words, and if you count the letters inside them, twenty-eight, which is four sevens. Nobody arranged that afterward. It is simply what the verse is, and it has been sitting in plain sight at the top of the page for as long as there has been a page. The Scriptures begin by doing the very thing they will spend the rest of their length describing. They finish in seven.
The number is bound into the language itself. Seven is sheva. To swear an oath is shava. They are the same three consonants — shin, bet, ayin — and the connection is not a pun that commentators invented; the lexicons treat the verb as built out of the number. To swear is, in the plainest sense, to seven yourself. When Abraham and Abimelech settle their quarrel over a well, Abraham sets seven ewe lambs apart as witness, and the place is called Beersheva ever after: the well of the oath, the well of the seven. You cannot say the one word without saying the other.
